


cymophane

by fated_addiction



Series: gemology [6]
Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal, Japanese Drama
Genre: Angst, F/M, Past Lives, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:54:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3170573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fated_addiction/pseuds/fated_addiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There is a complexity to dreams. They start like memories. </i> Usagi, Mamoru, and the inescapable timeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cymophane

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the [_gemology_](http://archiveofourown.org/series/198065) series, following [_goshenite_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3156764).
> 
> Spoilers all the way up to and including Act 13, slight spoilers for the 'R' arc of the manga because, well, we haven't really started that yet in SMC. 
> 
> Cymophane is another name for 'cat's eye' and comes from from the Greek words meaning 'wave' and 'appearance' that refers to the haziness that visually distorts the stone's surface.

Her eyes close.

-

 

 

 

"You're not sleeping," Luna says. "This is, what, the third nightmare this week? That I know of."

Usagi buries her hands in her sheets. They don't smell like Mamoru. She has a sweater for that. There are socks that are too big for her. Later in the week, she'll tell her mother that she and Ami are going to do a project. For school, of course. She'll start at the temple; they all know where she is going to end up anyway.

Her eyes are closed though. Luna is breathing heavily at the window sill. Usagi feels her eyes. They're kind. They're always worried; she feels guilty too.

"It's the fourth," she says. "Or the fifth." Her head throbs; she scrapes her fingers into her sheets. "I don't know. I don't really count anymore, Luna-chan."

"You sealed her. You sealed Metalia."

Words of reassurance. Luna is Luna and will always be Luna. She will worry from a distance. She will listen and stay close, just as her mother wanted. It's called guilt. There's just no need to name it anymore.

Somewhere between the ice and bitter wind, Usagi stopped being fourteen and just a girl.

-

There is a complexity to dreams.

They start like memories. Remember Usagi as a small girl. Remember Usagi learning to ride her bike, love her parents, and that time, that one time, she climbed a tree, fell, and broke her arm because she was always just a _happy and clumsy girl_. Sometimes she hides in the reality of those dreams and repeats: remember things, remember yourself.

In the days after they come back and Beryl is gone, Metalia is sealed, Usagi bridges together the pieces she cannot share. She remembers her mother but barely calls her mother. She remembers the ginzuishou. Conserve your energy. Use wisely. Remember it will kill you first. Desire is a dangerous, disastrous thing. 

Then there is Metalia.

 _Chaos is everywhere_ sticks with Usagi the worst. She smells it like the blood on her hands, or the memory of Mamoru's head in her lap, that weight, those wisps of hair under her gloves as she touched and begged him awake. Her skirt torn. The cold biting at her lips. She hears screams, still sees those screams, sometimes when people pass as she remembers her choices and the way the darkness sort of crept and swallowed the cities around her. She hears it again and again and again; _chaos_ , just _chaos_ , over remembering and forgetting faces, her beautiful mother and that sad smile, _my life for your second chance_. It makes her desperate but she never says anything.

She thinks to herself: I should remember that name.

-

"You don't have to hide them."

"I'm not hiding them," Mamoru tells her, embarrassment written too clearly. He is sitting on the couch when she walks in from the temple. She has one bag with her school uniform; there is a second with her math books.

"Mamo-chan," she says gently. She hesitates. "At least --" She puts her bags by the wall. She feels young and old. "I won't ask any questions." She rubs her hands together. Her palms are warm. "Unless," she murmurs. "You want me to."

There are things he cannot tell her. She tries and phrases it responsibly. There are things he cannot tell her yet like there are things that she won't be able to tell him. Yet, she tries and thinks. _Yet_.

She still sees the pouch on the coffee table. There is a small bag. She knows that inside there are four more pouches, each for a stone and the corresponding girl. He asked her, you know. She hesitated then too.

"They're all in pieces. From catching the sword."

Her stomach knots. Mamoru takes the bag and dumps them over the coffee table. The colors are irrelevant. She can name them: nephrite, zoisite, jadeite, kunzite. She knows the order. The order isn't important.

"I don't know where to start," he says, confesses, mouth grim. She sits next to him. "I know I keep saying that. Part of me wonders if this block on my memories is a little bit of all of us. Then I wonder ... am I really trying to protect myself?"

"Probably," she replies.

He looks up, startled. 

She has to look away. She goes to that part of herself. The one that she tries and thinks and even reassures herself -- the part of herself that got left behind, back in the cold and buried with Metalia. Her teeth press into her lip. There is nowhere to hide. This is what happens when you love someone this way.

"I didn't want to accept that you had been taken from me." Her lips twist and she glances quickly at him. "I just couldn't. It got in the way of a lot of things. My ability to think straight, for once. My ability to cope... Luckily, everything decided to happen at once and I, well, I -- I had no choice but to move through it. But I get it, you know. I get _it_ , Mamo-chan."

His hand brushes her arm. Then he picks up a mix of the stone pieces. She repeats again: nephrite, jadeite, kunzite, zoisite. Out of order.

"I should be able to do this."

Usagi shakes her head. "It doesn't always go the way you want it to go."

His lips perk. "Wise words," he teases. The pieces of stone rest against a palm. Her gaze lingers on the purple, if you could call it purple. When she thinks of kunzite, she thinks of lavender. It may be a memory.

Mamoru's fingers touch her face. They move to her jaw. Then they move over her mouth.

"I don't want to talk about this anymore," he says, really say, and it is shy and strange and even though they have come to terms with this piece of them, _their_ past, it is more than just new for them too. "Please," she hears him say. "I want to just take this time with you."

She no longer takes this as a dream. It stays simple; they are behind a door they share. They sit on his couch. His fingers move from her mouth to her wrist. He is careful, like he's still afraid to touch her, but the second his fingers are on her wrist, his mouth is on hers, and he is kissing her like it makes more sense than breathing.

She never hesitates this way. Her mouth is on his and she fills in the gaps as best as she can. Usagi is quicker to learn: she gives, he takes.

-

Things are forgotten (temporarily) when a child falls from the sky and points a toy gun to her head.

This is not a game.

She finds a fragment in her jewelry box. She does not know how or why. She knows it's kunzite not nephrite. She understands why it's the one out of the four. She is almost mad at Mamoru for this (and Luna, and maybe Ami-chan; Ami is the only one who would _rationally_ agree to do anything like this) because if had asked her, she might have laughed but she would have listened.

But in her room, there is a lamp and a desk. There is her jewelry box to the side. Her bed is angled by the window. It is easy to see when her mother is coming to yell about homework. It is easier to know when Luna is off, disappearing to meet Artemis at a halfway point outside the arcade.

It always feels kind of strange when she is alone. 

So she tries homework. She opens her books. She closes her books and goes to sit on her bed. She sits by the window and stares at the sky. There is too much light from the city; the moon is almost always faint. The piece of stone stays in her palm though.

"You have questions."

Usagi jumps. She scrambles back on her bed, against the wall, and reaches for the first pillow her hands can grab. She tucks it hard against her chest.

Kunzite is kneeling on her floor.

"You're in my room," she says, "and I -- why are you in my room?" She blinks and uncurls a fist. The fragment sits against her skin. "Did --"

"She did," Kunzite jumps in.

Usagi relaxes. Her fingers close around the fragment and she puts it by her bed, swinging her legs around. She stares at him. He remains on his knees, head bowed.

"You don't need to do that," she tells him, her voice remains somewhat shy, "It makes me feel really uncomfortable."

She takes a better look at him too. There is no particular way to remember him. He looks like he did before and she takes the idea of _before_ lightly. There is something inside of her that says _i remember him handsome_ and she remembers him smiling and she remembers him close to Venus. She remembers an intimacy that is both startling and devastating. It makes her feel both young and too old.

Usagi shifts off the bed. Her feet touch the carpet. Her lips curl and she reaches forward. Her fingers touch his forehead. He jerks but it's slight.

"Should you -" she bites her lip, "Isn't it better to stick to Mina-chan? Or even Mamo-chan?"

Kunzite shifts back. He still doesn't look at her directly. Usagi turns her hand back into the bed. Her fingers catch and bury themselves back into the sheets. He stands though and she thinks he is very real and very much supposed to be here with her. She doesn't understand why.

"They worry about you." He pauses. "And selfishly," he's hesitant, "for me, I think the answers are with you too."

Her lips purse. "That's a huge burden to have."

"I think you expected this."

She flushes. She brushes a hand through her hair. Her mouth opens and closes. She thinks of Chibi-Usa then. The small girl that fell from the sky. She thinks of things like familiar habits and even smaller things: they could be family. Her memories of the moon and of her mother seem so distant and sparse. They continue to come back here and there. They continue to come back and decide whether or not they are important enough for her to have.

The truth is that there is something familiar about the younger girl. She cannot hide it. Usagi thinks she might not even know that she's hiding it.

"No." She shakes her head, finally swallowing. "I'm still trying to sort and get used to my own memories."

Kunzite makes a soft sound. A sigh? "I wonder why we were left to these differences," he says then, and it doesn't sound like something he would say. She watches him and her mouth begins to twitch because something inside of her thinks _you're fishing_ and she knows he's fishing because she is just as much in the dark as he is. 

You are going to have to better than that, she thinks. "Maybe," she says carefully. "You have unfinished business. The kind that doesn't -- you have to make peace with whatever that is before you can move on," she says too. She sounds every bit the Princess and it is startling. She and Mamoru are the same that way; they think of their selves in separate entities. "Did you really come to see me because she wanted you to?"

His mouth opens. Then it closes. He regards her and something inside of her thinks _we have been here before_ because _you're fishing_ also feels like a secondary clue. She starts to study him. She looks through the lines of his face and tries to see him in the backdrop of what she remembers of the moon. Was he in palace corners? Did she only know him when she snuck into her corners of Earth? 

But her memories of Earth and the Moon, then, and even further back, continue to remain ambiguous and large. She remembers the girls. She remembers her mother. She remembers those last nights, the prayer room and the sensation of the sword breaking both the fabric of her dress and her skin. She does not remember may sights or smells; there are small pockets for the embraces between her and Endymoin and the cold, lonely distance of the surrounding skies. 

Memories are memories, she thinks. Her head starts to hurt and she pushes her empty hand and fingers into her hair. She's dropped the fragment in her bed. 

"You always knew me better than you needed to," he says.

Usagi smells the sandalwood next.

-

 

The headache hits her during her English lessons. They come a lot. Sometimes they hit harder than she expects. 

Makoto walks her to the nurse's. She holds her hand and brushes her hair from her face. She looks worried. Somewhere between the classroom and first floor, she fumbles and pulls Usagi aside.

"I'm not good at this," she says, and pushes Usagi's hair from her eyes. "I just want to bake and feed you things."

Usagi manages a smile. The pain comes and comes a lot, right between her eyes, but she grins and bears that because she can't burden any of the others with this; this is part of using the ginzuishou. She comes apart at the seam and sometimes it starts to show.

(There was a lesson, a dream. She remembers staring at her mother and they were sitting face to face. "You will feel tired and angry and lonely and desperate and tired and you will think I can't show any of them --" and all Usagi remembers is a sad smile, "-- it's part of this all," she had said.)

Makoto leaves her at the nurse's. She offers to say. Usagi says something like _come and get me later_.

Pluto appears this way.

There isn't any fanfare. She is sitting at the nurse's desk. There is a white coat, a purse leaning against the drawers, and the chair spins and turns when Usagi enters the office and sits on the bed. She looks at Pluto and feels uneasy.

"Setsuna," the Time Guardian reminds her, as if she heard her thoughts. She doesn't smile but her gaze is gentle.

The pain remains. It starts to push into Usagi's head, just a little harder, dragging itself down and around her jaw. She feels tired but manages to stay sitting up.

"Setsuna," she repeats.

"Would you like something?"

Usagi shakes her head. Her eyes close. "It's going to go away," she says. She remains guarded.

"Do they know?"

The wheels from the chair Setsuna sits in scrape against the floor. They roll closer and Usagi feels a soft hand at her shoulder. Gently, she relents and allows the older woman to guide her into the bed.

"I don't know." This isn't a lie. "I'm usually better about keeping them to myself." They have enough going on, she doesn't say.

There are questions. There are too many question to ask the Time Guardian. She can't be selfish. She doesn't know how to be frank (not yet) and a strange desperation is starting to manifest inside of her. She thinks of her mother a lot. She thinks of _unpopular choices_ and sees Chibi-Usa's desperately fearless face. She thinks of Kunzite, then she thinks of Mamoru and her girls.

"Answers," she says suddenly. "Why don't we have all the answers? Why are our memories so incomplete?"

Setsuna remains honest. "I'm loyal to the timeline," she says.

The answer is quiet not muffled. Usagi turns into sheets and there is a warm, wet towel stretched across her forehead. Her mouth purses. Somewhere inside of her, the anger is unrelenting. If she puts the memories together, if she groups Mamoru, the girls, and even the fragmented generals together, the answers will be buried in there somewhere. She feels useless and young.

"They will appear -" she listens to Setsuna hesitate, "those answers you want --" not _need_ goes unsaid, "but I must remain loyal to the timeline and see it through."

Usagi bites her lip and sighs.

"I understand," she replies and mostly means it.

She grows a little older this way.

-

"He's alive."

There are days that Minako sounds a lot like a general instead of a teenage girl. It makes Usagi feel older too. And cynical. It's a strange thing to come to terms with.

"Who is?"

She remains calm. They are sharing a milkshake at the arcade. Downstairs, Luna and Artemis are putting schematics together for a meeting. 

Usagi's fingers play with her straw.

"Nephrite," Minako says. She looks to the window. Usagi can read her. There are creases in her mouth. Some days, Minako is a lot angrier than they think. "Or Nathan," she says bitterly, "Makoto blurted it out the other day. When she went to see him. Again."

There is something interchangeable about the two of them. There are days where she realizes that she could have been Minako first. It's a terrifying thought. She envies and marvels and worries about Minako. They are all just girls. That much is true. But the more they fall into this, return to all these memories while battling it out with these choices and inescapable decisions, Usagi finds herself wondering if they were ever meant to be just girls anyway.

"Leave her be," she murmurs. Her hand drops from her milkshake. She watches Minako's face change. She gets this faraway look to her. Usagi watches her swallow, then her jaw tighten. "I mean it," she adds. She sits straight. "I would say the same thing to her about you."

Minako's mouth twitches. It doesn't reach her eyes. "Is that an order?"

"Mina-chan."

The other girl leans forward. She touches Usagi's hand. Usagi doesn't pull away. Her hand turns into her fingers.

"You make it sound so easy."

"Is that why you let me see Kunzite," she asks, her voice quiet again. Minako looks surprised like she wasn't expecting it. There are a lot of things that these girls try and hide from her. They have to have to have their secrets. She needs them too. There is no other way to be normal; her mother's promise haunts her this way.

Minako flushes. "I didn't let you see him," she mutters. "The idiot decided to that on his own," she pauses, blinking, "Mamoru-san, hasn't -"

"I'm not interfering."

At some point, Serenity has grown up just as much as she has in these last couple of months. There is no other way around understanding that. She knows it's happened in the way that Setsuna -- Pluto, she corrects herself -- watches her, or even Chibi-Usa with her wide, wide eyes. 

She leans forward then. She pushes the milkshake forward.

"It's chocolate," she says.

"It's too sweet."

Usagi raises an eyebrow. "You're ridiculous."

Minako takes the milkshake anyway. She takes a sip and there's a loud, sharp slurping sound. Then she yawns. 

"I know, you know," she says after awhile. "I appreciate it. I appreciate that you're letting us have the space to make decisions. But Usa-chan ..."

Minako stops, mid-sentence. Her mouth opens. Then it closes. Her face changes. It's not subtle enough to be a complete change, but it's a change: Minako's mouth narrows, her fingers curl into fists, and it looks like she sees someone she knows. Usagi blinks and then turns, if anything, to see, but the other girl reaches forward and curls a hand around her wrist.

"Don't," she says quietly. "Don't Usagi-chan."

"Mina --"

"Please don't turn around," Minako says. Her mouth dries and her heart starts to pound. She tenses, staring straight at the other girl. "Please," Minako says.

It doesn't matter if she curious. It doesn't matter that everything inside of her is saying _turn around now_ because of the way Minako's face completely transforms. She will never forget how small she suddenly looks or how tight her fingers feel over her wrist. Her nails are almost breaking skin. There is a sense of panic, but Minako never breaks face. Usagi sees fear and she sees the girl struggle to regain face.

"What's going on?" she manages.

Minako exhales and looks away.

A man passes their table. She only sees his back.

It's familiar. She meets Minako's gaze.

"Sandalwood," Usagi says.

-

Mamoru makes dinner. When they finish, they leave the plates on the coffee table.

He pulls the stones out again. She watches as he sets them out across the kitchen counter. Both nephrite and kunzite have been gathered and are almost whole. She doesn't ask how he's done it. This isn't her place, she thinks.

"Do you think you saw him?"

Usagi bites her lip, meeting his gaze. "I don't know," she says slowly. She remembers: the sandalwood in her bedroom, the sandalwood in the arcade. She remembers Minako's face. "There was a distinct smell," she murmurs, "and then... I just I felt like I was supposed to know."

Mamoru studies her. He reaches forward, brushing his fingers against her face.

"You don't think," his voice catches, "that Nathan-san is the only one, do you?"

"I think it's possible," she says.

He rubs his eyes. "I'm not going to get the answers like this."

She says nothing. How can she? She watches him breathe. He still touches her face, dragging his fingers to touch her lips. She kisses them and tries smiling but can only think that it feels beyond them at this point.

There is a feeling of helplessness. She sees it in him. She sees it in the girls. She can do nothing for them.

The zoisite stands out the most in front of her. The pieces are smaller. She almost reaches out to touch them.

"What are you going to do? Can I help," she asks, and she means it, genuinely, because she doesn't know what else to ask him. They are still just as new. Things are not as simple as _i love him_ even though she's sure, so sure, that the girls are under some kind of impression that they are set. She feels guilty for thinking this way, guilty for protecting Mamoru and their relationship a certain way, but she won't even begin to apologize. It makes everything else contrite. 

He gives her a crooked smile still. He flicks her forehead and she blinks, flushing.

"Stop it," he says.

-

There is a series of events that follow. The timeline never accounts for details.

Chibi-Usa is their daughter. Usagi grows a little older and Mamoru still has no answers to any of his questions. They stumble into the Gates of Time. Rei is hurt. Makoto disappears here and there. Ami makes excuses and Minako, well, Minako is always hiding something else. 

Then Usagi meets their future.

A hologram of a king greets her, then she finds herself staring at a fairy tale enclosed in nothing crystal, glittering dangerous in that small, small room. She will remember Mamoru's hand tightening over her shoulder, and the sound Minako breathing desperately next to her. She doesn't remember who asks but she remembers Chibi-Usa making fists and crying and _guilt_.

"It's the ginzuishou," Endymoin tells them and the hologram flickers. "It's the only thing that makes any sense."

He still talks like a man without any answers.

Usagi approaches the crystal. Her gloves are cool against the wall. In her head, Usagi recites: nephrite, zoisite, kunzite, jadeite.

"It isn't," she says.


End file.
